Equal parts scary, icky and wild outrageousness, Drag Me to Hell is a new kind of horror movie, one that makes you laugh at the same time you’re jumping out of your seat.

Director Sam Raimi, who thrilled us with the adventures of Spider-Man on screen, returns to his more humble roots with Drag Me to Hell, co-written with brother Ivan. Raimi’s first successes were with the Evil Dead films, in which a group of college students on vacation in a mountain cabin read from The Book of the Dead and quickly turn into flesh-eating, joke-tossing ghouls. Raimi’s Evil Dead films were as funny as they were gory.

He has gone well beyond that formula in Drag Me to Hell, during which the audience will find itself talking back to the screen at some of the outlandish things Raimi has concocted … such as a slice of cake that looks back at you, a persistent fly that eventually trots right into the heroine’s mouth or the heroine getting covered with embalming fluid slime after tipping over a casket. Not to worry. In the very next shot she pulls herself up off the floor and looks fresh as a daisy and dry as — pardon the expression — a bone.

Never has so much fun been made of false teeth, dirty fingernails or coughed-up phlegm. The producers knew their audience when they edited Drag Me to Hell just enough to get it a PG-13 rating … though a hard PG-13 at that. Well, there’s no swearing, no nudity and no sex, all of which have become staples of horror films these days. But there’s plenty of grisliness, such as an arm being thrust down someone’s throat right up to the elbow as well as lots of flying eyeballs. There also are heavy footfalls on the stairs, strange shadows on the wall and ominous creaking sounds that seem like a coffin is being opened just off-screen.

The film begins wildly, at a 1969 mansion in Pasadena where a Mexican immigrant family begs help from the resident medium after their desperately ill son has been cursed by a Gypsy woman from whom he took a necklace. The scene is played, like many of the other scary moments in Drag Me to Hell, with overwrought earnestness that prompts “do-you-believe-this?” chuckles … until all hell breaks loose, literally.

Cut to today. Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a bank loan officer who plans to get tough in hopes of impressing her boss, who believes she is too easy with clients. She hopes it will lead to a big promotion. Unfortunately, Christine chooses to demonstrate her backbone by denying a loan extension to a beleaguered old Gypsy woman, Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), who needs the extra time so the bank won’t repossess her house. Mrs. Ganush looks like an ogre. She has a filmy eye, coughs up phlegm and takes out her crooked false teeth, placing them on Christine’s desk. Raimi paints everything in bold strokes, never shying from going over the top. When Mrs. Ganush is turned down for a loan, after falling on her knees and begging Christine to reconsider, she places the curse of the Lamia on Christine which turns her life into a living hell until the real fires of hell can claim her.What follows are a series of grisly encounters as Christine goes to the limits to undo the curse. The first terrifying event takes place in a parking garage and is played so far beyond reality that at first one might expect Christine to wake up from this nightmare. But Raimi only falls back on the old “it was only a bad dream” escape once much later in Drag Me to Hell. Yet because she seems so sweet and looks so delicate, especially when she’s called on to do devilishly monstrous things to retaliate or save herself. This trait serves the character well at a dinner party where Christine meets her boyfriend’s parents for the first time. The affair starts off on wobbly footing because of her boyfriend’s skeptical mother who thinks Christine isn’t good enough for her son, shifts to solid ground and actually seems to be going pretty well … until things suddenly go maddeningly, crazily wrong. Her boyfriend, Clay, is played by Justin Long as the soul of patience and understanding, even when he is befuddled by Christine’s mood swings and her insistence that she has been cursed.

An Indian mystic, Rham Jas (Dileep Rao), is consulted and this seer sees terrible things in Christine’s future. He tries to help — for a price — with a solution that involves the medium from the start of the film, a séance, a goat and a long knife. This is a movie where bodies fly into the air, animals are sacrificed, a bloody nose turns into a gusher and the innocent line “Here kitty, kitty,” becomes a reason for deliciously ghoulish laughter and unease. When someone advises, “You must invite the dead to commingle with your spirit,” no one is kidding. Drag Me to Hell is a movie of goose bumps and funny bones that will leave you laughing … and looking over your shoulder on the drive home.

****Drag Me to Hell

Starring: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, David Paymer, Dileep Rao.

Rated: PG-13, contains grisly violence, scary moments.

mjanuson@projo.com